Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed and claimed herein generally relates to continuous collection of data that pertains to an Application Programming Interface (API) ecosystem, wherein the data to be collected is produced by interactions between the ecosystem, and API users and API systems. More particularly, the invention pertains to collection of Web API ecosystem data, as the term “Web API” is defined herein.
Description of Related Art
As is well known by those of skill in the art, Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, are increasingly important for integrating with different APIs, applications and functionalities. APIs are also important for companies and others, to enable partners and consumers to access respective company services and resources. An API ecosystem comprises an arrangement, such as a marketplace or developer site, wherein participants in API related activities have one of three roles, and typically have multiple relationships with other participants. These three roles include the API provider, API consumer, and API ecosystem provider.
API ecosystems, including Web API ecosystems, must deal with related challenges, such as publication, promotion and provision of Web APIs by providers, and identification, selection and consumption of Web APIs by consumers. In order to address these challenges, as well as to match consumers with relevant APIs, to support API providers, and to thus ultimately assist API ecosystem evolution, relevant information must be made available for API ecosystems. This information includes API usage, API characteristics, and the social environment around or associated with a particular API ecosystem, but is not limited thereto.
Notwithstanding the importance of information of the above type, current methods for acquiring such information tend to be rather limited. For example, current methods include approaches that are based upon crawling of information. Such methods are comparatively inefficient, and can be too inadequate to collect the amounts of data that are increasingly required.